In Iowa, Team Obama Looks Back — And Forward

Most of the interest in Iowa’s presidential caucuses Tuesday will inevitably be on which Republican candidates come out on top, but that hasn’t stopped President Obama’s re-election campaign from also spending some time on the Hawkeye State’s first-in-the-nation voting.

Obama’s re-election campaign released a pair of online videos.

One features a much less gray-haired Obama from 2008. It was the then-senator’s “closing argument” which Candidate Obama put out the night before the Iowa caucuses that year.

“It’s pretty incredible to see candidate Obama talk about what President Obama ultimately did,” Mitch Stewart, battleground states director for Obama for America, says in an email introducing the videos. “He makes four specific promises — on reforming health care, making college more affordable, ending the war in Iraq, and putting us on the path to energy independence — all of which today, four years later, are promises kept.”

The second video released Tuesday by the Obama campaign is a video prepared by New York Times journalists.

While Obama may not be facing any real competition for re-nomination this year, the video tells the story of Obama activists who nonetheless have been drumming up support for the president, as sort of a dry run for November.

The Times goes so far as to call Obama “the most organized candidate in the state.”

As the Times notes, winning Iowa in November could be crucial as part of an effort by Obama to roll up the 270 electoral votes required to win a second term.

Scott Nance is the editor and publisher of the news site The Washington Current. He has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.

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